Office of the President
The 21st-Century USM
From: President Selma Botman
February 12, 2009
This is the fifth update of the new semester. I'll be using this format for official communications and, later this month, I will be posting to a new blog for more informal communications. Please don't hesitate to contact me directly at president@usm.maine.edu.
Second Draft of Strategic Plan Ready for Input
The Strategic Plan Working Groups have now finished submitting their suggestions for revision of the first draft of the 2009-2014 strategic plan. Dr. Timothy Stevens has revised the draft with those comments in mind and delivered the second draft that I am distributing today for broader community feedback. Please visit the Strategic Planning Web site at www.usm.maine.edu/spp to view and print the new draft. Click on the link "Preparing USM for the Future 2009-2014" in the "Latest News" box on the right side of the page.
Let me outline the next stage of the process for soliciting your best thinking on this evolving draft. This process will unfold during February, March, and April. We will conclude this semester with a new strategic plan in place and begin preparations for implementing it, beginning in the fall 2009 semester.
Rather than asking each individual member of the campus community to send me feedback, I'm asking that all responses be coordinated through your academic and administrative unit and through your Senate. This will ensure that campus feedback is available to me in the form of a coordinated, single response from each representative group.
Here is the three-step process, which will culminate in a final draft:
1. The deadline for comments on the current draft is March 6. The chair of each academic department will submit the departmental response to the appropriate academic dean, who will, in turn, send it to me, copying the provost. Likewise, administrative offices/divisions/units will solicit responses from staff members and submit them to the appropriate vice president or administrative executive, for transmission to me. Finally, by March 6th, the chairs of USM's four Senates will submit to me feedback from their respective bodies.
2. Dr. Stevens will revise the draft with your suggestions in mind. This third draft will go back out to each of the constituent groups with a request for additional feedback. We will ask that this stage of feedback focus on how this third draft will affect these groups and how they envision their role within it. We'll follow the same process for submitting responses as outlined in #1, with a deadline of April 13.
3. Dr. Stevens will revise the draft one final time, once again taking advantage of USM's best and most creative thinking.
Organizational transformation is exciting and daunting, both conceptually and practically. However, we are at one of those rare moments when we are compelled to rethink and re-imagine what we believe that we must and should do as a University. Although change is imperative, your input, experience, and creative thinking are absolutely critical to the process. This is your opportunity to play a vital role in charting the course toward USM's future.
I am deeply grateful for the contributions of the four Working Groups that kicked off this process, and I look forward to benefiting from the hard work and conscientious suggestions from those of you who have yet to contribute. At the end of this academic year, we will have a new roadmap for USM's direction. While we can only imagine where this journey will take us, I am sure that you share my excitement about what we will experience, and what we will discover about ourselves, along the way.
